On 4 December 2024 Brian Thompson, the CEO of United States private health insurer UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down by a masked man. The attack took place in broad daylight, by an anonymous figure who handled his firearm in a calm and professional manner, and executed the CEO in a clearly premeditated assassination. The figure has not been apprehended, and anything that can be said about him at the time of writing is conjecture. What we do know is that the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found etched into bullet casings from the shots that he fired. The words most likely reference the 2010 book “Delay Deny Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.” The book outlines the tactics employed by the private insurance industry to extract money from people while blocking their ability to actually receive the funds promised to them when needed.
This assassination has ignited a media firestorm. Most tellingly, the response to the killing has starkly revealed an underlying fury in the average US American citizen. Under every news story, from Reuters to NBC News to even Fox News, the overwhelming tone is one of celebration that an indirect, social mass murderer got what was coming to him. For once, all propaganda and the standard US “sports team” attitude towards politics is being tossed aside, and pure class interest is on full display. While news media, capitalists and police wring their hands and wag their fingers, the masses cheer for a taste of rare justice.
This is hardly surprising. In the United States, it is comparatively simple to claim health insurance on small expenses, but once you really need it, once you or a loved one is diagnosed with a debilitating illness, a life-changing accident, or even something more routine like a broken arm, suddenly you’re forced to fight for your contractually-promised cover while also fighting for your life or health. Your provider will mess you around to push out the deadline, then tell you that you’re not covered, and leave you with one option: dragging the ordeal through the courts, which you probably cannot afford, let alone handle while struggling with your health condition. The Brian Thompsons of the world are paid absurd hoards of money for running these filthy companies. They get away with it, because the other option for the average US worker is no cover at all, and absolute destitution unless you have a job that shields you from such an outcome.
This system is almost universally reviled by the USA’s working class, but no political attempt to replace it has managed anything beyond light reforms. Even Liberal darling President Obama merely tinkered around the edges, while expressing his opposition to enacting fully-funded public healthcare for the sake of preserving all the unnecessary labour that goes into the for-profit health insurance industry. This is the sort of system that awaits New Zealand if the ruling coalition government is able to dismantle public health and force its private, for-profit interests into the health system.
When conditions become both so brutal for the working class, and also as completely immalleable as they have become in the US, discontent is bound to rise to a fever pitch. They’re bound to spill over as the only form of change that an individual can enact: violence against oligarchs who stand over us as allegories of a disgusting, unjust system.
For my part, I’ll shed zero tears for that monster and his early demise, and I won’t pretend that I haven’t joked with friends and comrades in private. But I cannot in all political honesty support the tactic of individual assassination and terror (a tactic just as available to our opponents as it is to us) that kills an individual while leaving the structure intact. This is an important point for us to make, particularly given that this seems to be an objectively successful assassination – the figure has so far eluded capture, the social conversation has pivoted to the evils of private healthcare, and another provider is withdrawing its deeply unpopular clawback.
The political power of our side, the international working class, does not flow from the barrel of a gun. It flows from our unique position as those whose brain and muscle make the wheels turn, and our ability to ‘assassinate’ entire systems and injustices as we see fit. The task is clear, but the road to it is much longer and requires far more dedication than a hitman can deliver. The task is socialism, and the road is organisation.
